I used PartitionMagic 8 to resize an NTFS partition, and it hosed tons of photos from our last trip to India. So I hacked together diskid32 and the Small JPEG Decoder Library and created a program to scan my hard disks for the missing JPEG files. It didn't find much more than GetDataBack did, and it was *way* slower. 30+ hours vs. 3 hours. So I shelled out the bucks for both GetDataBack NTFS and GetDataBack FAT. Both excellent programs.

To automate the building of mixmaster 2.9.1 and OpenSSL 0.9.8d with MSVC using Cygwin, I created the Makefiles mixmaster.mak and openssl.mak and the patch file mix.mak.patch to fix a glitch in Win/mix.mak.

To build OpenSSL, type:

$ make -f openssl.mak

To build maxmaster, type:

$ make -f mixmaster.mak

Of course, to run make, you will need to install Cygwin and select the make and wget packages. Alternatively, you could unzip cygwin-1.5.23.zip, which contains only the executables needed to run make.

After running ROBOCOPY, Windows XP SP1 decided the disk I was copying *from*, was whacked. Suddenly XP can't see the drive is formatted. A reboot solves nothing. It contained the only copy of all our pictures from our last India trip. And I was just about to burn them all to DVD.

So I bought GetDataBack for $119. It tries, but fails, to get much off the disk.

So now I'm left with writing my own program in C++ to read the raw disk data to see if I can extract the images. I know the data is there.